


Carrying a torch for her (also a pitchfork)

by Morbane



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Genre: Bar Room Brawl, Constructive Criticism Welcome, F/M, Humor, Post-Break Up, bad Wellington history, gleefully purple prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 02:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17256002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: When The Beast first travels to New Zealand, Vladislav is both prepared - and unprepared.





	Carrying a torch for her (also a pitchfork)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brodeurbunny30](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brodeurbunny30/gifts).



It was a soft and sullen night. The hills smelled of mud, fetid rather than fertile, so far yet from spring; and the slow-south-moving clouds pressed down into the valley like a pillow pressing down over a mouth and nose, acquiring the imprint of first sweat and lipstick and soon, perhaps, more vital fluids.

Two words wheezed out into the loaded air as if they were to be the speaker’s last.

"She’s coming."

* * *

It was a cold night, but to most senses not unusual; late May was bitter in the capital, and also petty, and rancorous, and Cook Strait-laced. Even the milder winds scoured cloth, leather, and skin, and the vicious ones played war games with civilians, sending pellets of rain and hail into anything that showed life; anything that didn’t; and anything in between.

It was a specimen of that last category that muttered, deep in anguish well beyond bad weather:

"She is coming."

* * *

The wind was rising as the night retreated. A gust became a gale - and such a gale! It seemed destined to blow the early sun out like a candle - perhaps to return, like one of those birthday candles that kept re-lighting itself, and perhaps not.

Vladislav could not hear himself speak, and yet the words of conviction he uttered rang like his earbones striking each other, _malleus_ upon _incus_.

"She is coming."

* * *

This was a quiet, convivial evening.

Viago had recently finished hanging sheer lace curtains in all of the windows, and was now using a leftover piece to make himself a new cravat. Deacon was swaying to the gramophone. Vladislav had been sitting at the table, with the thought of reading, though really he was digesting a recent - excellent - meal; he found himself rising, standing, moving to the window, looming over the dark grounds in place of the night, because he also found himself thinking that as far as looming went, the night was not doing a good enough job.

The light from the room reflected on the window, but Vladislav did not see the look Viago and Deacon exchanged behind him, on account of them having no reflections.

Abruptly, savagely:

"At last, she comes," he said.

* * *

What they did not tell you about becoming a vampire (as well as all the other things they did not tell you, because it was very bad manners to talk about being a vampire) was the importance of who you knew.

A new vampire had their sire to guide them in unlife. Most other vampires held them at arm’s length, sometimes over high ramparts as a flying lesson, waiting to see if the new vampire would betray or bolster vampiredom. They could be very patient with their waiting. If there was anything the undead, greedy though they were, possessed in excess, it was time to spend with their fellow undead. 

So, long before Vladislav and Petyr and Deacon and Viago had come together as flatmates, each had a sense of the other's reputation. Viago, whose sire's sire had been a guest at Vladislav's new flashy mountain castle back in the 1500s, had had a slight case of hero worship. Vladislav had met Deacon once at an inaugural (not repeated) gathering they'd both been invited to in Estonia. And anyone who was anyone knew about Petyr.

Vampires were gossips. When you faced the prospect of spending the rest of eternity with the same people, in an ever-shrinking world, _damn_ did you collect the grave-dirt.

So when Vladislav got either a sudden mystical feeling, or a dispatch from the undead network of familiars and servants, telling him that the vampire Pauline Ivanovitch was considering moving to New Zealand, Viago and Deacon did not imagine their friend’s enemy appearing over the horizon, a cloud longer than the land, dark as one of Egypt’s plagues. They did not not imagine a creature that was animal, mineral, and vegetable all at once. They imagined someone like themselves (maybe a little nastier, and certainly less refined, and with better eyeliner).

Not that they’d have dreamed of telling him this.

And Vladislav’s tales of the Beast were compelling. Listening to his brooding utterances, the other vampires could feel the clouds creeping in. Pauline Ivanovitch sounded like an enemy to be reckoned with. Even if she wasn’t their enemy.

* * *

Vladislav remembered.

They’d met in the Grand Duchy of Finland, in spring.

Sometimes it caught him unawares, when names and borders changed. In this case it seemed fitting that the place and people had moved on. What he and Pauline had was gone; nothing of that time should therefore remain.

(This met a skeptical audience in Deacon, who pointed out that Finland very much continued to exist. But it was the spirit of the thing, and Vladislav was not swayed by Deacon’s doubts.)

They had travelled together. To the roof of the world. To the Caribbean, twin coffins in a ship’s hold, rocking beside each other on the waves.

He remembered her dry, rustling kisses. How beautiful she looked bathed in a victim’s blood. 

In one of their orgies, they’d fucked against a ballroom ceiling, a sea of writhing bodies below, all with their faces turned up. As he finished, she pressed him into the carrera moulding, her fingernails tearing into his shoulders, and then she slowly let him down.

Even before he knew her taste for cruelty matched his own, he was fascinated by her. She had no sire.

“Many Russian vampires do not,” she told him. “The wicked in life - when they die, sometimes they return to their village to curse it again.” In life, her fair face had matched a foul heart. Her village had doted on her. She had eaten them. All vampires rise hungry.

“One day, perhaps I will eat you too.” They were so dramatic in those days. He adored her. He hadn’t listened.

He remembered the fight. The last of the fights. With love and war blurred between them, it should have been a warning sign when the sex - in retrospect, he was able to admit this - began to be a little dull.

Just before her last thrust, he remembered the look of wonder in her eyes, at a _What if_ novelty she had not yet tested. Then she ripped the lamp post up, and drove it through him. He couldn’t have done it more cleanly himself.

He had screamed and howled at her, of course. After a little while, when - to her disappointment, apparently - he didn’t seem to be dying, she was provoked into screaming back.

He ran out of insults first. In his defense, he had an iron bar through his lung, and she didn’t. Unfortunately, his gasps bored her. The last insult: she did not care enough to watch and see him die.

He got himself off the post. Many lesser vampires would not have succeeded in that. By then, of course, she was gone.

* * *

“She is coming,” said Vladislav, in an especially gravelly voice.

His last presentiment had been only a month ago. Deacon shrugged, and finished off his row of knitting. Viago looked sideways at the letter Vladislav was holding, hoping that it contained a bit more gossip than just that.

Vladislav pointedly twitched the letter away. “She is coming,” he repeated, his eyes lifted, his tone deep.

“Do you know... when?” Viago asked, very carefully.

“On the _Antonia_ ,” Vladislav pronounced. “In February of the next year.” He folded the letter carefully.

“We will be ready,” Viago pronounced loyally, though he was thinking gloomily about February, and how short the nights were then.

* * *

Vladislav and his friends waited on the docks.

The passengers streamed out. Here and there a group straggled to a motorcar. But the inefficient exit did not account for a pointed absence.

“She is not here,” Vladislav pronounced at last.

“Great,” Deacon said a little too quickly. “In that case I might pick up a meal before I get home, see you later...”

Viago felt keenly that Vladislav’s mood was a bit much for one observer to bear alone.

“Some trick! Or the papers, they have the wrong schedule...” he offered brightly. A perpetually pesky thing about summer was that morning newspaper deliveries came after sunrise. They were always a day behind.

Vladislav went to consult with the ferry clerks. Viago trailed behind.

“She is in Auckland-of-a-hundred-lovers,” Vladislav declared. “May she steal them all from him, and take joy in none.” 

“Yes, indeed,” Viago said politely.

“She does not come here. The coward.”

“She is afraid,” Viago suggested boldly, seizing at straws to cheer up his friend.

Vladislav’s clenched jaw sufficed for a response.

* * *

Five months later, when the Beast travelled again, it was of great interest to the household in Miramar.

“Christchurch,” said Vladislav. “ _Christchurch_.”

Vampires do not enjoy speaking or hearing words infused with human belief. Vladislav had been muttering for a few minutes already, and Viago had a headache.

“So she has fled the island,” Viago said encouragingly. “Again, it is not big enough for both of you, yes?”

“Hm,” said Vladislav, sulky. “But she does not confront me! All this time...”

A twanging from behind them. Pointedly, Deacon had dragged the double bass out of the sitting room, and was beginning to saw at the strings.

* * *

She came at last, not looked for, and not hoped for.

It was a comfortable night in a sturdily-upholstered Vivian Street bar, in the east end of the street, where a cluster of small old houses and nascent warehouses set a rough and ready tone. The nightclub boom of the late 60s had passed this place by, and now that Wellington’s citizens had actual choice about where to drink until 10pm, most chose not to drink here.

Vladislav had been playing pool. Deacon and Viago had been drinking - a pair of misdirected tourists just off their cruise, earthy blood with an aftertaste of salted caramel.

She stood in the doorway, her eyes glittering, her heels sequined.

In retrospect, perhaps Vladislav should not have lowered the pool cue and charged.

Then again, maybe there was no better option. Between the two of them, surprise offense was no longer possible.

She was, as ever, a worthy opponent.

Banshees in the corner scattered as the combatants lurched their way across the room. Deacon tried to reach in and got a handful of hair; when Vladislav swung the pool cue dangerously his way, he instinctively grabbed it, and the tussle served merely to deprive Vladislav of a weapon.

The fight reached the wall. Vladislav felt a handle press into his back. He shoved Pauline off him, and when she dove at him again, screeching, he flung the door open behind him and made a calculated stagger back, sticking out his feet to trip her on them.

There was a howl, and a bang, and a clatter, and a gurgle, and a chorus of screams.

Viago started forward to lend a hand, or at the very least, an ear.

One of the banshees fixed him with a look. “Don’t,” she said.

A witch strode out from behind the bar and into the fray.

The door they’d disappeared through was, of course, marked Ladies.

The battle raged for half an hour. It was clearly uneven; Pauline, after all had help. That was almost certainly why she emerged, and Vladislav did not.

“Your friend,” she spat out (along with a button Viago recognised from Vladislav’s shirt), “is outside.”

There was indeed a window behind her large enough for a bat to fit through, but just before Pauline’s reemergence, Deacon had also heard the sound of flushing.

* * *

In the alley behind, with a backdrop of the residents’ pointedly twitching curtains, Vladislav, Viago, and Deacon considered the situation.

“Take a quick bite,” Deacon suggested. “Go back in. Surprise her!”

“No,” said Vladislav, summoning unexpected dignity considering half his hair was stuck up at an angle, matted with blood, and the other was wetted down and clinging to his skull. His shirt had one button left, on his left sleeve. “In our next fight, I shall choose the battleground.”

It seemed he would not soon have the opportunity. On the following night, they learned that Pauline Ivanovitch had departed the city.

“It is not big enough for the both of you,” Viago suggested tactfully.

Further details from the gossip network made it seem likely that Pauline was merely following her original itinerary, but he did not change his stance.

It was important to to bolster Vladislav’s courage for the next fight.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to Kat! and hu-u-uge thanks to 20thcenturyvole for handholding & beta-ing. Thanks also to angelsaves & Rosefox for brainstorming.
> 
> Thank you, brodeurbunny30, I really appreciate your earlier comments and I'm glad you liked it.


End file.
